Writing Powerful Songs for Praise & Worship EBOOK

Dedication

This e-book is dedicated to you and to all aspiring Christian songwriters seeking to make a diﬀerence in the world through your music. May it inspire you to think more deeply about the actual craft of great worship songwriting and spur you on to write your best songs in the days ahead.

Introduction…. Aren’t there enough worship songs already?

1……… Make listening your lifestyle

2……… Become a student of great songwriting

3……… Get on mission

4……… Develop an extraordinary imagination

5……… Get in community and grow with others

6……… Conclusion and Resources INTRODUCTION

Aren’t there enough worship songs in the world already?

The ﬁrst thing I wanted to do after coming to Christ was write a song about it.

Apparently I’m not alone.

Through many years as a music business executive and now as President of Nashville Christian Songwriters, I have encountered thousands of aspiring songwriters who have a common passion to bring men, women, and children into a deeper sense of worshiping God through their original songs.

The ﬂood tide of these songwriters is only increasing, showing no signs of slowing as far as I can tell. In the three years since NCS has begun to offer coaching for songwriters, I have personally spoken with over 1,300 such songwriters about our programs, and, without fail, each of them has relayed a similar story.

“I just feel called to songwriting and I know God has something bigger for me,” they all say in one way or the other. I smile and nod, knowing that God is much more jealous for His own glory than all of us combined.

Of course He’s got something bigger, I think to myself, listening as they continue to pour their hearts out about this seemingly insatiable desire to write something, anything, that could reach millions of listeners and lead them into the deep love and joy these songwriters feel in their hearts and rightfully long to express in the world through their music.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably more called than you can even imagine. God would love nothing There can never be more than for you to excel in communicating His endlessly loving character to millions, even billions, enough worship songs in of people. Why would he not want that?! the world….. never.

There can never be enough great worship songs in the world.

We’ll be discovering and experiencing new facets of God’s being forever. For all eternity, God will be revealing new aspects of His infinite Being to us. I think about it like that time-lapse video photography of gorgeous flowers opening up. Louis Schwartzberg’s Netflix series “Moving Art” episode called “FLOWERS” is totally mesmerizing and I imagine God opening up beautiful new facets of Himself to us non-stop for eternity like those time- lapsed flowers. Just when we think we’ve seen all of Him, He’ll peel back even deeper layers of His boundless love, grace, and endless powers.

And that’s why there can never be enough worship songs in the world, especially great ones. We will never exhaust the beauty of God, not even in the vast eons of timelessness with Him forever and ever.

Okay, so I got cosmic on you pretty quickly here, but I’ve actually met people who have so little imagination that they think there’s nothing left to write about in our worship songs. How terribly sad.

To say there’s nothing left to write about just tells me you’re not growing in your understanding and experience of God.

Do you actually think it’s even possible to run out of things to experience and to write about in our love relationship with God? Well, if your version of God is one-dimensional, ﬂat, boring, and stuck in one outdated mode of understanding, okay. You’ve probably run out of things to say.

But, if your relationship is actually a living, breathing, vibrant, organic, and holistic one, you’ll never run dry. Never. And if you think it takes work to make a relationship with God this amazing, you’ve skipped some lessons in grace along the way and started thinking He’s put it all on you to make it happen.

Wrong again.

Worshiping a god you’re afraid of is no worship at all. It’s idolatry. Heart-felt worship only ﬂows from an all-encompassing organic and visceral adoration of One so obviously beyond us, yet so humbly among us as Emmanuel (God with us).

Ultimately, we worship what we place the most value upon, i.e. what we ascribe the most worth-ship to, and that’s an activity of the heart ﬁrst. “Worship is the one, total adoring response of man to the one eternal God, self-revealed in time.” ~ Evelyn Underhill

Just like God may be revealing new facets of His character, nature, and attributes to us throughout whatever “eternity” turns out to be for us, our earthly responses can also grow and reveal new facets of our worship of Him while we’re still here.

Sometimes this looks like a raw trusting in the face of a bad diagnosis.

Sometimes this looks like letting go of bitterness when you’ve been horribly betrayed by a friend or colleague.

Sometimes it looks like actually getting a job you prayed for, or not.

Sometimes it looks like forgiving yourself for what you did last night when you’d rather die than tell anyone about it.

Sometimes it looks like feeding people you think are too fat or too lazy or too under-engaged with your religious beliefs to deserve your handout.

Sometimes it looks like accepting the sexual preferences and lifestyle decisions of people around you, even if you deeply disagree with them from a biblical or cultural standpoint.

Sometimes it means giving up something precious to you in order to receive something God seems to think is better for you, leaning not to your own understanding, but trusting His higher wisdom.

A response of worship from our hearts to God can come in myriad ways and anything to the contrary is a serious failure of imagination.

How could there be nothing left to write about? Our concept and practice of “worship” is greatly impoverished when we reduce it to mere singing.

Okay, stay with me. I’m going somewhere with this. You’ve read this far, so hang in there and let me get to the how to of writing engaging worship songs after just a couple more important points, okay?

Obviously, we don’t have the space here for an entire treatise on biblical worship, but just recall that the ancient Hebrews had many words for worship that included shouting, kneeling, dancing (even gyrating), and falling on your face before YHWH.

Doing any or all of these things neither causes nor guarantees genuine worship.

Sufﬁce it to say that singing is just one expression of the many possible ways to worship, so it’s entirely reasonable that we all need to grow in our love and worshipful expressions of God both in and outside of church.

Why do I go into all of this before sharing ways to write better and more engaging worship songs?

My goal is to engage you in a higher level of thinking about worship before you write it for others. It’s all too easy to target CCLI revenue or think that we’ll feel better about ourselves if we could just get a hit worship song “out there” somehow.

But here’s the real question: what’s your own worship like? Are you deeply engaged with God, responding What’s your own to Him with more than a few songs a week? Are you worship like? loving those unique folks around you well? Are you pouring your life out for the culture and even the planet we live on to make it a better place?

Not here to judge. These are all questions I ask myself before I sit down at the piano or pick up my acoustic to strum a few chords and sing something. I know what it’s like to sing from an empty heart. I know what it’s like to be an outright hypocrite in what I say and what I do. I don’t want to be there again. What follows are some things I’ve found to be important in writing songs that engage others in exploring their worship of God.

I took this picture in the balcony at a Jesus Culture concert a few years back. It was loud. I loved it. Worshiped my guts out. Lost some pounds there. Kim Walker-Smith did her thang. It’s still one of my favorite pics and favorite concerts and I love that they and Bethel Worship and Hillsong grew out of local church expressions of music.

I served as Director of Song Development and Copyright Management at Integrity Music and always loved the fact that it grew out of an organic movement of worship, too, as many hundreds of simpler worship songs were bubbling up in the church. Integrity just recognized this move of God and helped the world to catch up.

Now it’s your job to capture what God is authentically inspiring in you.

What are the real themes bubbling up in your life right now? You can write a great worship song about it. What are the messages on your heart to the real people around you about the love and power of God to transform them? You can write a great worship song about that, too.

As I’ve said, the ideas and material for writing great worship songs are happening all around you, 24/7, 365 days a year. They never stop. God never stops singing over you (Zephaniah 3:17), but are you listening?

That’s my very ﬁrst suggestion for writing great worship songs. Listen. 1…. Make listening your lifestyle.

I know. You were expecting something like “use more than three chords” or “don’t use swear words” for the ﬁrst suggestion, but believe me, this is the most important suggestion I could ever make for you to take giant strides in your worship songwriting.

Listening… really?! What do I mean by that?!

First, let me rant a moment. No one listens anymore. Everyone talks and talks and even yells. We, as a culture, have lost silence. We’re noisy. We’ve lost the love of solitude and meditation. We’ve long forsaken the art of listening well and are suffering immensely for it on a personal and global level.

End of rant.

Here’s the truth. People who learn to listen well have better song ideas. People who are busy talking and shouting rarely have any unique, new, or interesting ideas to share with the world. When we’re more interested in what we have to say than what others might bring, we’re missing a lot.

Listen to God inside you.

Listen to the Word on the page.

Listen to the radio.

Listen to books.

Listen to the music others make.

Listen to your heart.

Listen to your wife and kids.

Listen to your husband (even if he doesn’t listen to you).

Listen to nature. Listen to the lady at the checkout.

Listen to the cars going by.

Listen to the preachers.

Listen to the people you don’t like.

Listen to the saints.

Listen to the sinners.

Listen to your body.

Listen to what’s not being said around you.

Listen to life.

Listen to the silence.

Do you know how many hit song ideas and hooks come from listening to your conversations with people? A lot. Paying attention during a casual conversation at the water cooler (insert anywhere people gather) can be one of the richest sources of song ideas because you can capture what real people are actually talking about.

If you aren’t listening, you miss a lot.

Keep the radar up and tuned in to what people are saying and you’ll ﬁnd out what’s most important to them. Then you can write about it. There is no shortage of song ideas. Just a shortage of imagination when it comes to listening.

Start with listening.

Listen. Listen. Listen.

Never stop listening. Create a lifestyle of listening and the ideas will abound. I promise.

My number one earning copyright out of over 400 songs I’ve had recorded and published (O Mighty Cross, co-written with David Baroni) happened because I was reading someone’s ministry newsletter and they quoted a poem no one’s heard of with that phrase.

I was listening to the words as I read them.

Now that song is in hymnals and I’m not even dead yet.

BAM.

Listen, people.

2…. Become a student of great songwriting.

What is it with Christian songwriters who think they don’t need to learn how to write well?

Anyone can put some words to a tune, but it doesn’t make it a great song. Like a child’s water color ponies hanging on the fridge, we all love our creations, but in the end only our Moms are obligated to love them, too.

I’ve had hundreds of aspiring songwriters tell me “God gives me my songs… He just downloads them to me… I write them in ten minutes…” as if I should be impressed somehow with their divine connection.

Listen. If God is blessing you with a direct download from on high, these should be some awesome songs. These downloaded gifts from God should be making headlines, getting ﬁlmed by the national news, showing up on Billboard and NBC Nightline and being celebrated at the White House, no matter who’s in charge there at the moment.

Sadly, these songs are rarely much beyond children’s water color ponies. Sure, they’re precious to Him. Every song written from your worshiping heart is. But that doesn’t mean anyone else will see their value or use them in Sunday morning’s worship service. I am not being ﬂippant or mean-spirited. Just truthful.

If would-be country songwriters got into a Nashville record company or publishing ofﬁce saying stuff like that they’d be laughed out and shown the door rather suddenly. But in the Christian world, we’re supposed to respect this kind of nonsense and act as if the writer is really hearing from God.

No. Enough. This has to stop. Now.

You’re most likely just hearing your own inner voice, that never-shushing maniac inside your head that talks to you all the time, sometimes saying nice things and sometimes running you into the ground. Sometimes it sings little ditties and makes you think you’re getting a download and are destined for KLOVE Radio.

But know this. Everyone, anyone, can “write songs” and hear tunes and put words to them. They can even get excited and call publishers and people like us sincerely believing they’re ready to be “discovered.”

That’s not real songwriting.

Real songwriting is an art, a craft, a discipline that is worth respect and worth much more than automatic writing or ten-minute downloads from God that will ultimately go nowhere.

When I hear “God gave me this song,” on the other end of the phone, I know that I’m dealing with a novice, someone who doesn’t understand that that phrase is the veritable “kiss of death” to anyone whom you wish would care about hearing your song on a professional level.

Granted, you and anyone else crediting the Almighty with their compositions are sincere. I get that. You want to come across as humble and giving God all the glory. Wonderful. That is as it should be. But please, please understand that that phrase doesn’t buy credibility with anyone in the real music industry. If God really gave you a song,

If God really gave you a song, you’d you’d never have to tell a soul. never have to tell a soul.

I don’t understand why Christian songwriters don’t think they need to learn how to write well. Doctors go to school. Lawyers go to school. You’d never hire a brain surgeon who just felt called to use a hacksaw on people’s heads. You’d never trust your children to a swim instructor who’s never learned to swim. So this thin veil of quasi - spirituality on Christian songwriting is a curse, a blight, a huge hindrance to where you really want to be with your songwriting. Just say no.

Never assume you’re a great songwriter when you’ve not paid your dues to learn anything about it. Writing from intuition is writing from ignorance 99% of the time (and I mean that in the best possible way).

Get help. Buy videos. Get coaching. Go to workshops.

Apply yourself to the craft of songwriting the way a med student does to clinicals. Almost every coaching client I’ve had has said, in effect, “I never knew real songwriting was like this,” nor should they know. They hadn’t been exposed to what it takes to fashion stellar hooks, use song structure correctly, or write compelling melodies.

I never knew real brain surgery was like this…

Investing in your skill to write great songs is an investment in your listener. Assuming you’re already a great songwriter could be exactly what’s holding you back from becoming one. Just saying.

Real ﬂow comes when you know.

Every discipline has its rules, techniques, and best Real ﬂow comes practices. You need to know the language of songwriting and immerse yourself in techniques that when you know. bring on the kind of ﬂow you long for in songwriting.

My high school choir director heard something in my undisciplined teen voice and got me started in college level vocal instruction when I was only in 10th Grade. It took a few years before I began to have mastery over my voice, and only after dozens and dozens of difﬁcult voice lessons and hours upon hours in practice rooms.

I could eventually use my voice the way it was designed to be used, almost effortlessly hitting the high notes and using breath control to deliver long, ﬂuid lines. I use that vocal technique to this day and relish the times in worship leading when I am on, those golden moments when I can sing no wrong.

That can happen in songwriting, too. It is very possible and something I’ve experienced often when the words and melodies are ﬂowing from a “North Star hook” that I’m really excited about. Athletes call that “the sweet spot” or “ﬂow” or “peak performance,” but it doesn’t happen without a lot of practice and you have to know the rules to practice well. Which brings me to another cultural myth in songwriting, that all you have to do to become a great songwriter is to write write write. Not true. You can write a thousand bad songs in a row if you don’t know much about writing songs. Just because you’re mimicking proper forms doesn’t mean you’re writing great songs.

Use some common sense here, please.

Back to our aspiring brain surgeon. If he doesn’t know what he’s doing, he could maim a million people and never execute one successful brain surgery. If you truly wish to become a successful songwriter at any level, you have to move from the fantasy of doing it to making it a reality by learning more about the real craft and putting it into a lot of practice. Pro level songwriters know what they’re doing. Why shouldn’t you?

World without end, amen.

3…. Get on mission.

The iconic Christian music producer, Greg Nelson, told me during one of our podcasts that many singers who come to him wanting to be great recording artists can’t answer the question of why they want to be great recording artists. The same holds true with almost every songwriting client I’ve encountered.

It seems that many people are more in love with the thought of being an artist or songwriter than they are in love with the true vocation of doing so. There’s often more fantasy running through their minds than reality and they’re rarely prepared for the harshness of this pursuit.

Because I’ve personally conducted over 1,300 potential songwriting client calls so far, I often find myself on the phone with many a recent female divorcee, middle-aged or later, who is trying to find a life and career after marriage and who is considering professional songwriting. In times like those I wish I was an LCSW. It could be a great fall back and I would genuinely love to counsel them. Nothing wrong with those sweet ladies. I cry and pray with them, mostly, and help them see that a new career in songwriting probably isn’t going to pay off fast enough to carry the mortgage. I’ve had calls from people with terminal illness, mental illnesses, drug addictions, the homeless or “house deficient”, as well as one guy actually still in jail. Love them all. Prayed and counseled them best I could.

But as in the earlier point, writing real worship songs, real worshipful songs that could possibly be sung by millions of people requires skill and skill takes time and investment to develop.

We’ve moved beyond the simplistic songs of the 1970’s - 1990’s. Worship songwriting has matured and bears You’ve got to know why you’re trying highly commercial markings, as we’ll to do this to become great at it. get into momentarily.

Songs like 10,000 Reasons (Redman/Myrin) and In Christ Alone (Townend/Getty) and What a Beautiful Name It Is (Fielding/Ligertwood) are each ﬁnely crafted commercial songs. They work on radio. They appeal to a massive number of listeners because they are ﬁnely crafted.

Are they more “anointed” than any of your songs? Yes, in the sense that they have the ability to reach a much larger audience for their construction. The writers felt something as they wrote them, we hope, but these people know how to write great songs and have proven it many times over. They’ve embraced their mission to write great worship songs and to lead people in singing them.

It’s much more than “using their talents to glorify God.”

It’s much more than “getting songs out there.”

It’s much more than “getting heard by the right people.”

These songwriters have embraced a real calling that they have paid a price to fulﬁll and that’s something few aspiring songwriters are willing to do. They’d rather have God drop songs out of the heavens on them and skip the discipline part.

But here’s a very important “secret.”

You’ve got to know why you’re trying to do this to become great at it.

The burning passion that drives top level athletes to work out day after day must be yours, too, a deep craving for excellence that makes it easy to choose crunches over cookies and the treadmill over trufﬂes. Soapbox alert!

I feel a rant coming on every time I hear an aspiring Christian songwriter use the word passion to describe their songwriting.

But, think about it. A passion is a very serious thing. The very word connotes suffering in order to accomplish something great and precious few songwriters are willing to suffer anything to fulﬁll their “calling.”

Jesus had passion. You might not, really.

That’s why it’s called “the passion of the Christ,” both the movie and the fact of his intense suffering and death.

What He did is the perfect picture of true passion, as have been other less divine deaths throughout history, the great Christian martyrs such as Saint Peter, Joan of Arc, and many more. It’s difﬁcult for me to hear hobbyist songwriters call what they do passion. Passion infers a price most are unwilling to pay. If songwriting is your hobby, let it be one. Just understand there is a difference between a hobby, Passion infers a price most something you enjoy, and a passion—something you are willing to go to tremendous lengths to are unwilling to pay. accomplish.

Our friend Jordy Searcy is a passionate young singer-songwriter who spent the better part of two decades learning to become a phenomenal guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter. The last few years he’s played hundreds of shows with audiences from a small handful to hundreds in house concerts, clubs, and anywhere people would listen. That dude is passionate. He’s paying the price of focusing all of his efforts and attentions on his songwriting and performing. Check him out at jordysearcymusic.com and on Youtube.

Does Jordy have more talent than you? Maybe. But maybe not. Maybe he’s just spent a lot more time developing his talent than you have so it appears he’s more talented. He probably has more real passion about what he wants to do than the average bear, so his accomplishments seem more outstanding when, in fact, many reading this could apply themselves as he has and accomplish much more than they have dared to dream.

What’s your real reason for wanting to write great worship songs? Is it because you’re so passionate about worshiping God from a pure heart that you can’t help but write? Or is it more because you so strongly admire the popular worship leaders like Chris Tomlin, Kari Jobe, Cory Asbury, and others who appear to be living a somewhat glamorous life of jetting around the world singing on huge platforms with amazing bands in front of tens of thousands of people that you secretly desire that for yourself? Let’s get honest with ourselves.

I wanted to be Steven Curtis Chapman. We started in Christian music around the same time and hung out brieﬂy before he became Steven Curtis Chapman. Seriously, I had a thing about this because he became a great artist early on and I was more behind the scenes as a songwriter and business executive.

He got a bus. I got a desk. He got a band. I got a day job. He made music videos. I made coffee a couple of times a day and wished I could be him. I did go on to make a couple of recordings with Integrity Music and many more on my own. I have ultimately had the privilege of leading worship in many parts of the world, but honestly, you guys, I had a thing. I would sometimes introduce myself at my concerts as him for a laugh, but deep down there was some jealousy. (Steven, if you ever read this just know I’m over it, okay?)

Comparison is death. God’s scoping your heart, not your CD sales. I don’t think anyone’s motives are ever completely pure, even and especially my own. But when it comes to worship leading and worship songwriting, it seems really important to me that we have the courage to examine our inner motivations and at least try to purify them. It starts, of course, with confessing that we might not have the purest of intentions to clear the way for something higher to be found in us.

Jealousy and the sin of comparison are the ultimate buzz kill for creativity.

One of the suckiest things about the way we look at Christian songwriting is that we can so easily disguise sucky motivations as wanting to “use my talents to glorify God,” and even worse, think we’re not glorifying God if we don’t ﬁnd broad recognition for said talents.

News ﬂash—God’s scoping your heart and not your CD sales.

Your greatest success as a Christian worship songwriter is found in pleasing the heart of your Father. That’s real worship, of course. In the meantime, seeking your why is super critical. Having a clear target is the easiest way to know when you hit one. Writing aimlessly because you feel “called” is so generalized that it rarely brings any real results.

What have you been through? A divorce? Abuse? Some wonderful victories that you want to share with the world? Instead of competing with current worship songwriters by falling in line with how they write, why not blaze a few trails with some stories and testimonials of how God’s brought you through?

Yes, it helps to learn from popular writers. I teach that concept to all the time to my coaching clients, songwriters just like you who are trying to connect into their best songwriting. Emulate other popular writers in the beginning. Then begin to ﬁnd your own voice, your unique style of expressing things that might resonate with an audience in a different way than what’s popular right now. Someone’s going to do it—why not you?

Identify your mission. Discover what God’s up to and why He’s wanting to say stuff through you.

Stop writing with no end in mind. Write for congregations? What would they really sing? Are your words in the sweet spot for them? Do they contain enough doctrine and what I call conversational poetics to make your songs interesting? Are they singable? Are they emotional? Are they memorable? Are they different enough to stand out and make people want to sing them?

Academics write papers and studies and publish books to “add to the literature” on a certain subject. What do you have to add to the literature of worship? Do you have a special angle to approach it from? Have you thought about it? Are you prepared to think about it? Find your mission and I remember the ﬁrst time I heard Leslie Jordan and you’ll ﬁnd your message. David Leonard’s song Brokenness Aside. They traveled and recorded as the duo All Sons and Daughters for nearly a decade and broke fresh ground in worship, blazing the trail for “confessional worship.” I’ll never forget the impact of that chorus as they pined, “Cause I am a sinner/If it’s not one thing it’s another/Caught up in words/Tangled in lies/But You are a Savior and You take brokenness aside/And make it beautiful, beautiful” (W/M Leslie Jordan and David Leonard © Copyright Capitol Christian Music Group. All Rights Reserved.)

Seriously. We didn’t talk a lot about brokenness and lament and abject dependency much before that song broke. We’ve almost worn it out at this point, in my opinion, but it was fresh then and opened us up to a new way of approaching worship and what was acceptable to say and sing. Bet a lot of worshipers found some healing and sincere connection with Jesus through that song. I know I did.

So what can you bring to the genre?

Will you rehash the typical “Here we are in Your presence” phrases and keep telling God what and who He is? Or will you take the time and make the effort to identify your particular mission for writing worship songs in this era, this day, this year? What would God really say through you to the people around you and maybe even to the world through your songs? Anything?

Find your mission and you’ll ﬁnd your message.

Find your lane and you’ll ﬁnd your language.

Find your vision and you’ll ﬁnd your voice. 4…. Cultivate an extraordinary imagination.

God isn’t withholding one ounce of the endless creativity that is Spirit in you. He’s got more than you could ever spend. For most aspiring songwriters, the lack of mission is about a failure of imagination, which is another key point if you want to become a great songwriter.

When you see a baby or a young child, you’re seeing them in their natural state, a very pure state where their brains haven’t matured to the point of complete rationalism. They exist in a state of tabla rasa, or “blank slate,” waiting to be written upon through the experiences and training of their childhoods, whether for better or worse.

Granted, a lot of things are pre-programmed in the form of DNA and certain aspects of their lineage will emerge, but for the most part, kids are still highly imaginative because they haven’t learned boundaries, imagined or real. They don’t know a pink unicorn isn’t up on the roof or that Santa Claus isn’t coming down the chimney. They’ll believe just about anything you tell them and they can play imaginative games with very little limitation.

Adults, not so much.

We’ve had imagination programmed out of us by well-meaning parents and signiﬁcant ﬁgures in our young lives. We traded the box of crayons for the college degree and left imagination and playfulness far behind the rational pursuit of a “normal life” that looked pretty much like everyone else’s. To be “different” has been shunned in every culture.

Madeleine L’Engle’s classic Walking on Water was one of the ﬁrst books I remember that called me back to my inborn imagination. From there I discovered Lewis’ Narnia and Tolkien’s middle earth regions, hobbits, and wizards. Slowly but surely, I began to believe that there must be more imagination lying dormant in me, a deeper reservoir of creativity than I had allowed to come forth in any area of my life.

The extreme dualism of my religion and of almost everyone and everything around me schooled me thoroughly in the absolutes of black and white, in and out, up or down, right or wrong, creative and uncreative. even to the point of believing that some people are “creative” and some aren’t. Accountants can’t be creative because they deal with numbers. Doctors can’t be creative because they deal with science and life and death. Only weirdo poets and extreme artists like Lady GaGa can be “creative” and wear meat dresses. I had cut myself off from the depths of my own creative soul for buying into the limiting constraints of a four-minute mile or racism or gender discrimination and just about every other judgment we make that excludes the vast diversity of God’s creation. Deciding you can’t be as creative as someone else is a pretty uncreative, unimaginative, and unresourceful thing to do. Besides, you’re you and they are them.

Abe Lincoln is quoted as saying, “I reckon folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” I want to alter that a bit to say that I reckon folks are about as creative as they want to be. Creativity is a mindset, not a physical trait like blonde hair. Creativity is something you cultivate in your life, not something you’re either born with or not. There’s no “creative gene.”

Think of yourself as a power plant instead of a AA battery.

Most of us have cultivated very limited imaginations. Scientists say the average human has 60,000 measurable thoughts a day. That sounds like a lot of thoughts until you ﬁnd out that over 90% of them are the exact same thoughts we had yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. Fact is, most of us are just reliving the same day over and over because we’ve never learned to use our imaginations to their fullest potential. Children have no trouble using their imaginations, but we adults seem to have forgotten or simply don’t choose to utilize one of our highest faculties, to imagine how life can be different, better, and more beneﬁcial to ourselves and to everyone around us.

Which would you rather be, a AA battery that runs out of juice and is either tossed or has to be reﬁlled over and over, or, an hydraulic power plant capable of generating endless electricity and all its beneﬁts for entire cities and countries? I’ll choose the latter, thank you. I want to be the one that brings endless energy and joy to everyone around me and who experiences peak performance and the highest possible outcomes for my life.

You can decide to generate creativity in your life by merely setting the intention to do so. An intention is a decision, even a small one, to move towards something different than you’ve chosen before. It’s like deciding to learn to like drinking water instead of soda. It might not seem very true at ﬁrst, but Think of yourself as a power plant the more water you drink, the more you live into your instead of a AA battery. intention and the more you come to actually enjoy drinking water over soda. You generated an appreciation for what water does for the body and moved towards drinking more of it by a small intention.

It’s never too late to cultivate an extraordinary imagination. And, what’s even better, you don’t have to like Harry Potter or Tolkien, for that matter, to be an imaginative person. That’s the beauty of having 7 or 8 billion people on the planet. It’s okay for us to be unique individuals who like what we like and who can imagine making the world a better place by using our unique gifts. Here are ﬁve ways to cultivate an extraordinary imagination to serve God in even greater ways through your worship songwriting.

#1 Stop writing on empty. Trying to write ex nihilio (out of nothing) is like trying to drive with a napkin over the gas gauge, pretending the actual amount of fuel in the tank doesn’t matter. While this may be a rather negative and action-less place to start, it’s really not. Another way to say it would be to “write out of the overﬂow” of your life.

Truth is, if you’re consistently coming up empty in songwriting, it’s a symptom that you’re probably living in an inspiration deﬁcit.

I personally believe that inspiration is always present, even when we’re not aware of Him. The water of the Spirit never runs dry, but we do. To change metaphors, we’re often the dry, rocky soil Jesus talked about rather than the well-watered, lush, Psalm 23 kind of people. But guess who’s fault that is? God never withholds and He never runs short on Living Water. Can’t be done.

Take the time each day to ﬁll up on audio books, reading, listening to podcasts and music and you’ll never lack for something to write about.

#2 Play more games. Fun is highly underrated in our Puritanical Christianity. The very heart of creativity is joy, that kind of boundless joy we had as children when the cardboard box was every bit as much fun as the plastic toy that came inside it. Fun of any wholesome type fuels joy and the sheer love of being alive. When we lose it, we’ve lost the source of creativity and imagination that makes for great songwriting.

Religious legalism might be good for those wanting to deliver stodgy, stoic, guilt-ridden messages, but who wants that? If you’re interested in helping people connect with the God whom Jesus reﬂected as He played with and blessed the little people, become more like one. Play more. Laugh more. Stop taking yourself and your songwriting so seriously. Lighten up and everyone around you will appreciate it, even your listeners.

Making time for play can be challenging in our highly driven culture, but it is possible. Carving out just a few minutes a week to do what’s fun for you, be it riding a bike or playing Monopoly or baking up a batch of granola, will add an element of joy to your life and ultimately to your songwriting that can’t be created any other way.

We bring all we are to our songwriting. If we’re depressed and angry, there’ll always be some spill over into the song, or at least frustrate us in the process. The greatest creators all found tremendous joy in their craft, even if they were otherwise miserable wretches like Van Gogh. Remember, he wasn’t very successful in his lifetime and his creativity was cut terribly short. What if he’d been a happier guy?

Have more fun and write better songs.

#3 Read something different. Never stop reading, studying, and loving the Bible, but broaden your reading to great devotionals, novels, blogs, magazines, poetry, and whatever you can ﬁnd to increase your word power. How can you expect to write amazing words if you aren’t ﬁlled with them? It’s one thing to write nice melodies and a far greater thing to write lyrics that will be around to bless people 100 years from now.

When I was working with the Gaithers for seven years, Bill would often ask, “Who’s going to care about this song in 100 years?” That question became a gold standard for my songwriting and I always think about it when I’m writing. When I’m tempted to use trite phrases or cheap out on a song, I hear his voice in my head challenging me to be better and decide to take more time to work on the song so it might, just might, be around decades from now. How can you expect to write amazing words if you aren’t ﬁlled with them? Here’s the deal. If we’re unwilling to spend the time it takes to write a classic song, we’ll probably never write one.

Mike Reid and Alan Shamblin spent six months writing Bonnie Raitt’s now iconic song I Can’t Make You Love Me. It started off as an uptempo bluegrass song, but they had the foresight to not rush the process, take their time, and write a classic. I don’t know what these guys read or fed their imaginations on to write such an amazing song, but they had complete mastery of the lyrical development, as time has now proven in the continued popularity of the song.

The challenge with reading the Bible as your only reference is that we tend to read it the same way every day. We have our favorite translation, our favorite books, our favorite chapters, and pet verses that mean the most to us. I would imagine very few reading my words here have ever made it all the way through Leviticus, am I right? We just seem to have Bible reading habits that can stiﬂe creativity. Be sure to change it up somehow to stir up some ideas.

The other challenge with not reading beyond the Scriptures is that we’re not using the vernacular of our day, but can wind up sounding, well, biblical, in our songs rather than conversational. Nothing wrong with that if your goal is to write Scripture memory songs to teach yourself and others the amazing verses in the Bible that increase our faith and love for God. But, if you want to reach a contemporary culture with the Gospel, I suggest your ground your lyrics in biblical truth, but read enough and expose yourself to language at such a depth that you can communicate easily in your lyrics to modern listeners.

Read read read.

#4 Hang out with people you don’t know or even like. Many writers I’ve encountered tend to write from one perspective, their own, with little to no exposure to the outside world. This often results in songs that are naive and myopic. Naive because they don’t take into account the real world experience of others outside their own tribe, their particular church’s view on life and all things religious.

I worked with one songwriting client who wrote a castigating song that was basically nothing more than his church’s bent on sending people to hell who didn’t believe exactly like they did. It was narrow, condemning, and would only play well on Sunday mornings in his congregation. I confronted him and I believe he got it from the rewrite he submitted.

Hanging out with people who are different from you challenges your notions about the world and broadens your perspective, ultimately showing up in your songwriting. It’s naive to think you can write songs that can touch millions of people and last for decades from an ivory tower of theological superiority. Getting to know people of different races, religions, cultures, and lifestyles will challenge your thinking and your songwriting as you grapple with the diversity of the world, God, religions, and communication.

Getting to know people different from us stretches our imaginations. If we never meet people outside our families, churches, and social circles, we never stretch and grow as humans. Diversity feeds creativity. The more we broaden our experiences in life, the more our creativity ﬂourishes. Go make some new friends. Join Toastmasters or Alcoholics Anonymous or visit a church on the other side of town where the worshipers don’t look like you or sing like you. It’s really fun.

As you grow and stretch as a person, your intellect grows and stretches. Meeting and hanging out with people unlike you is a great way to learn new things and increase your imagination as a communicator. Don’t be afraid. You’re a nice person, so they’ll really love you.

#5 Listen to more music, but listen critically. I know I mentioned this earlier, but listening to a lot of music is critical for a songwriter. Once you understand more about how music, especially lyrics and the titles and hooks that drive them, are written, the more critically you can listen and absorb great ideas for your own songwriting. When I say listen critically, I don’t mean with criticism or a judgmental attitude. We have plenty of that. To listen critically is to listen with understanding and comprehension.

Think about it this way. You, like almost all humans who aren’t songwriters, have grown up learning to listen to music emotionally and physically ﬁrst. If it’s a love song, your heart responds with loving feelings. If it’s got a good beat and it’s easy to dance to, you wanna shake what yo’ mamma give ya and you get your groove on, like when you hear the classic Mary Mary song “Shackles,” right? It’s just how we’re wired to consume music—it’s about emotions and groove.

But, as a songwriter, you have to dig deeper than the emotion a song evokes or the beat that makes you want to move your hips. You have to train yourself to listen (back to listening) to what’s happening in the song—how is it constructed? Why is that hook stuck in your head for days? How did the writers piece it together to be so cohesive and consistent and well-crafted? Just asking the right questions is a major step towards becoming a better songwriter as you listen with different ears.

Here’s an example.

You love to sing “In Christ Alone” by Keith Getty and Stuart Townend. It still raises goosebumps years after you ﬁrst heard it and you’re convinced it’s a song that will certainly be around in the year 3020, if Christ Himself hasn’t returned. But why do you love it? How did these brilliant songwriters construct the song so it sticks forever in your brain and elicits glowing praise for Jesus?

Listen to the song with inquisitive ears.

Go play it now or run it down in your head and think about it. It’s written in a hymn like fashion with four identically phrased verses. They didn’t trick us by making the third verse irregular or syllabically different —the syllables and line lengths all match, so we don’t have to relearn the melody for each verse. Smart guys. They’re not making us work too hard. We can learn from that, but what else?

Notice that they chose a Gaelic melody reminiscent of Irish folk songs. Timeless. That choice alone goes a long way in explaining the immediately classic sound and immediate acceptance of it. Had it been written in a more rock ’n roll or pop idiom, the iconic lyric may have been wasted. By casting it in the Gaelic, or to us an early American, sound, the song found instant success and is now a standard.

That’s listening critically and taking time to analyze and understand what’s happening in the song’s construction. Listening critically will change your songwriting because you’ll be learning every time a song is playing, anywhere and anytime. There’ll be a little voice in your head asking, “Now, why does that hook work and how did they come up with those lyrics and why does that melody sound so good with those words?” And on and on.

Listening critically to music gives you many more options in your own songwriting, period.

5…. Get in community and grow with others.

God didn’t think it was good for man to be alone.

I don’t think so, either, but songwriters often ﬁnd themselves lacking a creative community to be part of and to grow with. Our churches are mostly focused on winning the lost, feeding the hungry, or anything other than fostering creativity. I believe that, if pastors understood the attractive power of creative communities, they would be all over growing the music, drama, and dance ministries in their churches.

As an aspiring Christian songwriter, you may not have the luxury of a local creative community, but you have some options. You can join online songwriting communities or beneﬁt from our NCS Membership and get some great resources with which to grow, making lifelong friends along the way. The digital age provides some nice perks, for sure.

Or, you could take some responsibility and Get in community and start leadership to start a songwriting group in your growing like never before. church or community. You don’t have to know much to do it, just ﬁnd a way to get the word out through Facebook or apps like Meetup and start connecting with likeminded (or maybe not so likeminded) songwriters to meet with once a month or once a quarter for critique and encouragement. You can have cookies and punch, or not. It doesn’t matter. Just make it easy and fun and encourage each other to better songwriting.

You probably already know the pang of loneliness in your songwriting, so I’m not going to write a lengthy section here about the need for community. You already feel it. But what I will do is challenge you to actually do it. It’s easy to procrastinate and think getting into creative relationships with other songwriters is too much work or unnecessary. But Proverbs 27:17says “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another (NIV)” and nothing helps us grow like feedback from others. It’s not always fun, like going to the dentist, but the rewards are worth it. Join or create creative community for yourself. Go to seminars and workshops. Join courses and online groups. Get in community and start growing like never before.

Worship itself is designed to be a corporate experience, even though private worship and praise are important, as well. Corporate worship is demonstrated and commanded throughout Scripture and that’s what you want to learn to write for, so participating in it regularly is key.

6…. Conclusion and Resources

Writing powerful songs for praise and worship is a high and holy calling.

As you write words that worshipers will sing, maybe even sing for years, it’s vital that you pay close attention to many aspects not mentioned here, as well as to crafting the greatest possible lyrics and melodies that have real staying power. We’ve concentrated on creative lifestyle principles in this ebook to encourage you to think at a higher level about all the aspects of your life that contribute to creativity in general, and songwriting speciﬁcally.

You’ll need to be aware of doctrinal issues as you write lyrics, of course, being fully biblical and well, worshipful, as you put words to music. It’s important that your worship songs don’t just talk about God, but are songs that actually inspire worship in your listeners. It’s easy to get into writing a laundry list of characteristics about God and never actually take the congregation into worshiping. Even the classic Revelation Song (Riddle) uses tons of description in the verses about the throne room of God, but the chorus actually worships—we lift our voices to sing “Holy, holy, holy/Is the Lord God Almighty…” (W/M Jennie Lee Riddle © Copyright Capitol Christian Music Group. All Rights Reserved.)

Other technical aspects to learn about are vocal range, chord progressions, instrumentation, recording, and publications. Songwriting is a vast subject, as is music itself. That’s why we offer online training and coaching for Christian songwriters at Nashville Christian Songwriters.

Read on for a list of resources and descriptions about all that NCS offers for aspiring Christian songwriters. Song Revolution with John Chisum is our premiere podcast for Christian songwriters. Featuring John’s wit and wisdom from 35 years of professional songwriting, publishing, producing, and global ministry, this show brings information, inspiration, and interviews with some of the most notable music industry inﬂuencers, artists, and songwriters.

With over 140 episodes and counting, Song Revolution with John Chisum is a must-listen podcast for songwriters at every level. Listen here.

NCS Membership is a growing online community of dedicated Christian songwriters seeking to grow in their gifts and calling to reach the world one great song at a time.

Offering monthly masterclasses, discounts on NCS events, creative support, and a safe place to showcase your songs, NCS Membership is the premiere Christian songwriters community ready to encourage and support you. Join here.

Song Revolution Workshop is a powerful three-day event in Nashville where you get to meet and hang out with some of the greatest music industry inﬂuencers of our day, have songs critiqued, connect, and learn like never before.

Join John Chisum and friends like John Mays, Founder & A&R Director for Centricity Music (Lauren Daigle and many more), Tom Jackson (Taylor Swift and many more), Kenna Turner West of Curb | Word Entertainment, and a staff of NCS Coaches ready to help you go to the next level in your songwriting. Register here.

NCS Song Coaching is offered online in eight-week group settings or in a twelve-week individual coaching setting. Songwriters progress rapidly and efﬁciently as they are guided through a 12-hour video series with assignments and exercises, meeting in a video conference call each week with John Chisum and guest coaches.

Powerful breakthroughs occur as each songwriter goes deeper into the experience of professional level songwriting. Read more here.

For more information, visit nashvillechristiansongwriters.com today.